I am Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, Senior Advisor for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation, General Counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. I served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. I am a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
I write about new, cutting edge ideas regarding public policy, particularly concerning economics.

Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago. I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations. See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data. In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate. With the conference presentations online, let’s see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN’s IPCC. You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

Check out the 20th century temperature record, and you will find that its up and down pattern does not follow the industrial revolution’s upward march of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the supposed central culprit for man caused global warming (and has been much, much higher in the past). It follows instead the up and down pattern of naturally caused climate cycles.

For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age. Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now.

In the late 1970s, the natural cycles turned warm and temperatures rose until the late 1990s, a trend that political and economic interests have tried to milk mercilessly to their advantage. The incorruptible satellite measured global atmospheric temperatures show less warming during this period than the heavily manipulated land surface temperatures.

Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Every 25 to 30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we have seen. The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

In 2000, the UN’s IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010. Was that based on climate science, or political science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes?

Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer. He publicly predicted in 2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010. He made that prediction because he knew the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UN’s IPCC did not know or did not think significant.

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A few years ago, I’d have needed a head vise after reading what I recognize now as the usual spew of garbage. According to Easterbrook, the next three years will see a drop in global temp of at least 0.5C. Uhhh . . . not gonna happen.

Since this is Forbes, let’s ask the readers if they would rather trust someone who bases their analyses on real world events, or on someone who looks at past trends, sees possible patterns, extrapolates those patterns into the future, and then asks you to bet the bank on it.

And is that old Willie Soon you’re speaking of? Of Soon & Baliunas fame? The same Soon whose work was so poor that six editors resigned after realizing what kind of work they had let through peer review?

You go, Pete. Soon (pun intended) you’ll be in the same reality-challenged boat as the sponsors of your cute little (but highly bizarre – like a cuddly kitten with eight heads) conference–Heartland.

Seriously — how many regular readers of Forbes fall for this garbage? You have insurance companies, the military, energy companies (albeit a bit two-faced about it), and agricultural organizations all gearing up for a warmer future. They’re all wrong, bets Pete Ferrara, laying his integrity on the table.

This comment by Mr. Leaton demonstrates what I say in the article about climate alarmists, again all ad hominem attacks, name calling, invective, no data, no logic, no analysis. Contrast this with the online presentation of Professor Easterbrook, calm, rational, carefully reasoned discussion of the data, no name calling, no ad hominem attacks, no invective. This is the state of the debate today, no wonder the public is trending towards the realists, in opinion polls, and at election day polls.

lol, contrast your incorrect assertion that the earth is cooling with the actual measurements. Calm reasoned incorrect information is still incorrect. I also really like how you compare a comment in a forum to a pre-prepared and edited report. Then you make the ad hominem attack extrapolating this to all climate realists and to top it off throw in the pejorative term ‘alarmists’. Nice work, do you ever look at real data or just print false information and troll for comments?

Don’t like that? How about here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#q3

Or of course the BEST study: http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#stopped

Speaking of logic and analysis, what physical process do you propose overrides the greenhouse properties of CO2? Or do you claim that this easily measured gas is not in fact rising in concentration in the atmosphere?

While we are at it, how do you account for the warming of the poles faster than the lower latitudes, the faster warming of the night thanthe day, and the cooling of the upper atmosphere while the lower atmosphere warms?

Stephania, I discuss the actual temperature record in the article, and provide a link to Easterbrook’s discussion of the full and well known temperature record including the sources you cite. This is not secret data. You can see the sources you cite further discussed and explained in full detail in the voluminous and unrebutted Climate Change Reconsidered. I also already discuss in the article the physical processes causing the global cooling. Those are the cyclical changes in the PDO, the AMO, and solar activity, all of which are far better correlated with the temperature record than the persistent rise in CO2 caused by the industrial revolution. Must I repeat myself? Also my point about the argument style of the climate alarmists is not ad hominem, but factual based on personal observation, which Mr. Leaton was so kind as to once again demonstrate for us here.

You also are going back to your PDO and AMO claim, but the problem for you is I have a science background and know that you are NOT replying to the observed facts I listed when you throw that claim in.

So here are the observed facts once again: “While we are at it, how do you account for the warming of the poles faster than the lower latitudes, the faster warming of the night than the day, and the cooling of the upper atmosphere while the lower atmosphere warms?”

These observed facts are consistent with warming from greenhouse gas increases, but they are not consistent with PDO. AMO, or solar activity.

So here is the problem, the earth is not cooling, the observed data (I listed the links for you already) when taken as a whole and not cherry picked like Easterbrook and you want to do shows a clear warming trend, not a cooling trend.

I am curious about the Climate change Reconsidered though, I will give it a look.

No, Stephania, you are changing the subject, and making false claims about Prof Easterbrook. He and I and Heartland and Climate Change Reconsidered have all together shown that the global temperature patterns of the 20th century are primarily due to natural causes, with human CO2 emissions having only a minor impact and in no way threatening catastrophic results. Indeed, I will claim on that basis that the theory of catastrophic human caused global warming has been proven false as a matter of science, which is how I read Climate Change Reconsidered, the work of Richard Lindzen, and the results of the satellite monitoring of the global atmosphere. So you give me your rebuttal of these sources if you want to discuss what I have written further. I have seen no good response to them.

Hi from Australia Sir.We are going through the same thing with all these name calling and Ad hom attacks.This is all the alarmists and scaremongers have now as the planet is not doing what their models predicted.We are now waiting for Hansens prediction of and Arctic sea ice gone summer 2012 which is not far away so we all get to see Hansens models accuracy.We have a face book page for realists with lots of knowledge not only from you folk but many other people.Keep up the great work.